  “I was born in Farmerville, La., I don’t know what year. I was about three or four years at surrender. I lived with my mother and father. The first work I ever did was plow. I did not work very hard at no time but what ever there was to do I went on and got through with it. All of our work was muscle work. There were no cultivators. “I stayed at home with my father and mother until I was 32 years of age. I was thirty years old when papa died and mother lived two years longer. About a month after mother died I married. We lived in a real good house. My father bought it after slavery time. We had good furniture that was bought from the hardware. The first stove that we used we bought it and father bought it just after surrender. Never used a homemade broom in my life. Now, Ma just naturally liked ash cakes so she always cooked them in the fireplace. We wore all homespun clothes, and we wore the big bill baily hats. We chaps went barefooted until I was 16 years old then I bought my first pair of shoes. They were brass toe progans. I never been in the school house a day in my life. Can’t read neither write nor figure. I went to church. Our first preacher was name Prince Jones. The biggest games I played was ball and card. I was one of the best dancers. We danced the old juland dance, swing your partner, promonate. Danced by fiddling. The fiddlers could beat the fiddlers of today. Get your partners, swing them to the left and to the right, hands up four, swing corners, right hands up four promonate all around all the way, git your partners boys. I shoot dice, drink, I got drunk and broke up church one Sunday night. Me and sister broke up a dinner once because we got drunk. Whiskey been in circulation a long time. There have been bad people ever since I been in the world.” —Will Hicks.
Person interviewed: Bert Higgins 611 Missouri Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas Age: 88 “I was born in slavery times. I was thirteen when peace declared. I was workin’ in the field. “No ma’am, I wasn’t born in Arkansas. I was born in Macon, Mississippi. “Marcus Higgins was my old master. He was good to me. He treated me all right. “He had a good big plantation—had two plantations. One in North Carolina and one in Mississippi. “Sold? Yes’m, I was put up on the block, but they couldn’t quite make it. Had six of us—boys and girls—and he sold one or two I ’member. But that’s been a long time. “Yes’m, I can ’member when I was a boy in slavery. Run off too. Old master ketch me and switch me. Look like the switch would sting so. ’Member the last switchin’ I got. Dr. Henderson—I think he was old master’s son-in-law. Me? Well, he whipped me ’cause I’d steal his eggs. I don’t reckon I would a been so bad but I was raised up a motherless child. My mother died and my stepmother died. “I can ’member pretty well way back there. “He’d send me off on a mule to carry the mail to his people around. And I used to tote water. He had a heap a darkies. “I could do very well now if I could see and if I wasn’t so crippled up. I was a hard worker. “Old master would whip me if I went any further than the orchard. If I did happen to go outside the field, I come in ’fore night. But I hardly ever went outside. Sometimes I run off and when I come back to the house, he’d give me a breshin’. “I seen the Yankees durin’ of the War. I run from ’em and hid. I thought they was tryin’ to carry me off. White folks never did tell me nothin’. They’d come in and throw things outdoors and destroy ’em—old master’s provisions. And they’d take things to eat too. “My father belonged to Marcus Higgins when I first could remember. “After freedom we stayed there till I was grown. I don’t never ’member him payin’ me, but I got somethin’ to eat and a place to stay. “I never went to school; I had to work. I farmed all my life till I come to the city of Pine Bluff. I worked here ’bout thirty years. “I’ve always been well treated by my white folks. I never sassed a white person in my life as I remember of—never did. I think that’s the reason I was so well took care of ’cause I never sassed ’em. I’ve always tried to do what was right. “I think these here government people have treated us mighty well. They have give us money and other things. “When we got free old master read it to us out of the paper. We was out in the field and I was totin’ water. Some of ’em struck work and went to the house and set around a while but they soon went back to the field. And a few days after that he hired ’em. “Old master was good. He’d let you stop and rest. He hired a overseer but he didn’t do no work. The time run out ’fore he got started. “I don’t believe in these here superstitions. I tried carryin’ a rabbit foot and I know it never brought me no good luck. If you serve the Lord and try to live right, pray and serve the Lord, and whatever you need you’ll get it.”
FORM A Circumstances of InterviewSTATE—Arkansas
FORM B Personal History of InformantSTATE—Arkansas
FORM C Text of Interview (Unedited)STATE—Arkansas “My mother lived to be one hundred years old. She died in 1920. Her name is Hulda Bruce. She belonged to a man named Leslie during slavery. I forget his name—his first name. She come from Mississippi. She was sold there when she was eleven years old. That is where all her people were. There might be some of them here and I don’t know it. She said she had three sisters but I don’t know any of them. The folks raised her—the Leslie white folks. It was the Leslies that brought her and bought her in the old country. I don’t know the names of the people that sold her. She wasn’t nothing but a kid. I guess she would hardly know. “The Leslies brought her to Arkansas when she was eleven. That is what she always told us kids. She was eleven years old when they sold her. Just like selling mules. “I don’t know what is the first place they come to here. Benton, Arkansas was the first place I knowed anything about. That is where her folks were and that is where the young generation of them is now. The old ones is dead and gone. “I was born in Nashville. And she had come from Benton to Nashville. She was living In Benton, Arkansas when she died. She was never able to “I got one of her pictures with her young master’s kids—three of ’em—in there with her. Anybody that bothered that picture would git in it with me, ’cause I values it. “Mother farmed right after the surrender. She married after freedom but went back to her old name when her husband left. He was named Richard Hill. He was supposed to be a bishop down there in Arkadelphia. But he wasn’t no bishop with mama. All them Hills in Arkadelphia are kin to me. She had four children—one boy and three girls. The boy died before I was born. She was just married the one time that I know about. “Her white folks were good to her. You know there was so many of them that weren’t. And you know they bound to be because they were always good to her. They would be looking for her and sending her something to eat and sending her shoes and clothes and things like that, and she’d go to them and stay with them months at a time so they bound to ’ve been good to her. All the young kids always called her their Black Mammy. They thought a heap “I spect my mother’s white folks is mad at me. They come to see her just before she died and they knew she couldn’t live long. They told me to let them know when there was a chance. “That was about three days before she died. There come a storm. It broke down the wire so we couldn’t let them know. My boy was too small; I couldn’t send him. He was only nine years old. And you know how it is out in the country, you can’t keep them long. You have to put them away. You can’t keep no dead person in the country. So I had to bury her without letting ’em know it. “I do laundry work for a living when I can get any to do. I am living with my boy but I do laundry work to help myself. It is so good, and nice to kinda help yourself. I’ll do for self as long as I am able and when I can’t, the children can help me more. I have heard and seen so many mothers whose children would do things for them and it wouldn’t suit so well up the road. You see me hopping along; I’m trying to work for Annie. “My mother told me about seein’ the pateroles before the War and the Ku Klux Klan afterwards. She knowed them all right. She never talked much about the pateroles. It was mostly the Ku Klux. Neither of them never got after her. She said the Ku Klux used to come in by droves. She said the Ku Klux were dressed all in white—white caps and white hoods over their faces, and long white dresses. They come out mostly at night. They never did bother her, but they bothered others ’round her that she knowed about. Sometimes they would take people out and beat them and do ’round with them. But she never did know just what it was they did and just what they did it for. You see, her white folks was particular and didn’t talk much before “She was a Baptist. She belonged to the white folks’ church before she was freed. Then she joined the Methodist church at Benton because there wasn’t no other church there. But she was a full-blood Baptist.”
Person interviewed: Clark Hill 715 E. 17th Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas Age: 82 “Good morning. My name is Clark Hill. My name goes by my white folks. I was born in Georgia—in Americus, Georgia. My old master was Will G. Hill and they called my young master Bud. I never did know what his name was—they just called him Bud. “It was my job to sweep the yard, keep smoke on the meat and fire under the kiln. Yes mam! Old master had a big orchard and he dried all the fruit in the kiln—peaches, apples, and pears. Then he had lots a watermelons too. When they got ripe they’d get all the childun big enough to tote a melon and we’d carry ’em to the house. I would like to be with my white folks now. “Old master raised pigeons too and it used to be my job to go down to the pigeon house and ketch the squalls (squabs). “I used to go to church with my white folks too. I was the gate opener. They put me on the little seat at the back of the carriage. When we got there they’d let us childun sit in the back. The preacher would tell us to obey our master and not take anything that belonged to him. “Oh, my white folks was good to me. He never hit me but once and that was one time when my brother went into the kitchen, went into some peas the cook had and she told on him. Old master come down “When you got big enough to marry and was courtin’ a woman on another plantation, you couldn’t bring her home with you. Old master would marry you. He’d say ‘I give this man to you’ and say ‘Clark, I give this woman to you and now you is man and wife.’ They never had no book of matrimony—if they did I never seen it. Then you could go over to see her every Saturday and stay all night. “I used to work in the field. They didn’t farm then like they do now. They planted one row a cotton and one row a corn. That was to keep the land from gettin’ poor. “I remember when the Yankees was comin’ through I got scared because some of the folks said they had horns. I know old master took all his meat and carried it to another plantation. “When freedom come old master give us all our ages. I think when they say we was free that meant every man was to be his own boss and not be bossed by a taskmaster. Cose old master was good to us but we wanted to have our own way ’bout a heap a things. “I come to Arkansas the second year of surrender. Yes’m, I voted when Clayton was sheriff and I voted for Governor Baxter. I voted several tickets. I was here when they had the Brooks-Baxter War. They fit not far from where I was livin’. “Well, that’s ’bout all I can remember. My mind ain’t so good now and I got the rheumatism in my legs.”
Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden |
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